Mark Cuban Wishes He Had Put Mavs on Open Market

Mark Cuban continues to speak publicly—and candidly—about his sale of a majority stake in the Mavericks. 

In a wide-ranging interview on the DLLS Mavs Podcast with longtime Mavericks reporters Marc Stein and Tim Cato, Cuban touched on a range of topics including the state of the NBA, the origin of his relationship with Miriam Adelson, and what he would have done differently in selling the team to the casino magnate. 

“I don’t regret selling the team; I regret how I did it,” Cuban said. “I would have put it out to bid. But I didn’t, so it doesn’t matter.” 

Cuban sold 73% of the team at a $3.5 billion valuation in December 2023. Since then the Celtics have sold for $6.1 billion and the Lakers at a record $10 billion valuation.

In the years since selling his majority stake, Cuban has continued to publicly weigh in on how the team has been run, and has been particularly critical of the Luka Dončić trade. Shortly after the transaction, Cuban said the team needed to “get a better deal.” He also told Front Office Sports he did not know about the trade until “just before it was announced.”

Cuban said he had expected to handle basketball operations after the Adelsons bought the team; the NBA has disputed his framing of the issue.

“Any decision as to what Mark’s role would be in basketball operations was a function of an arrangement to be made between Mark Cuban and [Mavericks governor] Patrick [Dumont],” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in March. 

On the podcast, Cuban said he deliberately kept 27.7% of his stake in the team in order to meet the league requirement of owning at least 15% of a franchise to be a governor, and he again disputed Silver’s comments that the NBA wasn’t involved in any discussion over whether Cuban would remain governor. 

“I did have it in writing,” Cuban said. “Like I said before, there was a clause in there that gave me the right to be in every meeting, every trade discussion, everything. And the NBA took that out…Who the hell do you think took it out? I mean, I’ve got the letter from my lawyer saying the NBA made us remove it.”

Cuban also criticized the increasing role of private equity in the NBA and how it has changed the league’s priorities. The NBA allows a PE firm to own up to 20% of a team. As PE money has flooded in, Cuban said the league is less prioritized in catering to fans. 

“It went from very entrepreneurial, ‘what can we do to make the NBA better for fans’ to ‘how can we increase valuations,’” Cuban said. “And those are two very different types of businesses. It went from ‘private equity’s not allowed’ to private-equity-dominant. … I think the NBA is losing a step on the entrepreneurial side and the fan side. The guys at the Warriors say, ‘It’s not show fun, it’s show business.’ And I never ran it that way. And there were a lot of other individual owners that never ran it that way. But that’s not the way it’s being run today.”

Cuban declined to comment further in an email.